BashSupport Pro 5.0: New Features and Changes
BashSupport Pro 5.0 is a new major version.
On this page you will find an annotated list of the most important changes since version 4.6.3. Please refer to the changelog for a complete list.
Licenses purchased at Jul 7, 2025 or later already qualify for a fallback license of the new version. Users who already used a trial can now activate a new trial period for the new version.
Content
Compatibility and System Requirements
JetBrains IDEs
With the new release, the latest JetBrains 2025.2 IDEs are fully supported.
Support for IDEs earlier than 2024.2 has been dropped. If you’re still using such an older version, please continue to use BashSupport 4.x, which supports 2022.1 up to 2025.1.
macOS
Even though BashSupport Pro itself is working on any version of macOS, the bundled binaries of ShellCheck and shfmt are only compatible with macOS 11.7 or later (macOS Big Sur).
It’s possible to configure BashSupport Pro to use the binaries installed on your system if you’re using an earlier version of macOS.
Editor
New Powerful Formatter
Finally, a native and more powerful formatter is available
BashSupport Pro 4.x only had limited formatting support, based on shfmt.
For example, common settings of the IDE like continuation indents or wrapping at the right margin were not supported.
With the new implementation, these settings and many more are supported now for shell scripts. shfmt still remains as the default formatter because the new implementation is still new and not yet widely tested. You can choose the formatter to use at Settings… → Editor → Code Style → BashSupport Pro → Engine and Style.
The new formatter also improves the editing of shell scripts. For example, indentation is now more reliable in the editor.
Tldr Pages
Quick documentation of commands now displays content from the tldr pages project.
BashSupport Pro bundles a snapshot of tldr pages. It does not fetch remote URLs to render tldr page content. There’s a new application setting to prefer tldr pages over content from man and info pages.
Intentions
The new major version provides a few more intentions for shell scripts.
Convert old-style test command
There’s a new intention to convert old-style test commands [ ... ] into the equivalent Bash [[ .. ]] command.
Join Conditional Commands
A new intention to join a pipeline of two conditional commands into one has been added.
Join Arithmetic Commands
In addition, there’s a new intention to join a pipeline of two arithmetic commands into one.
Miscellaneous Editor Improvements
“Expand Selection” now works better inside command lists and pipelines.
It selects the segments separated by tokens like |, &, && or ||.
Typing a closing element like done, esac, fi or ]] now decreases the indentation level in the editor.
Line continuations are now inserted if Enter is pressed in the middle of a command.
Syntax Support
Bash
BashSupport Pro 5.0 now supports Bash 5.3 and bundles updated builds of shfmt and ShellCheck to support the new syntax.
Zsh
The new formatting engine provides support for Zsh. Previously, only shfmt was available, which did not support Zsh. Now, all extended formatting settings are available for Zsh files.
The parsing of Zsh syntax has been improved for 5.0, too.
Run Configurations
Run as Superuser
It’s now possible to execute run configurations as superuser (sudo).
The settings are available at Advanced Settings → Run as sudo in the settings of a run configuration.
On Linux, kdesu, pkexec and sudo are supported for locally executed commands.
kdesu is only used if the user is using a KDE desktop.
On Windows and macOS, the system’s ability to run as the superuser is used.
For remotely executed commands, sudo is always used.
Remote Run Targets
For remotely executed run configurations, the upload of data has been improved.
It’s now possible to skip the upload of the working directory to the remote host. This is useful to quickly execute a single, self-contained script on a remote system.
The locations of the uploaded working directory and the uploaded script file are configurable now. If the script file is contained inside the working directory, then all files are uploaded to the configured project root path.
shfmt
shfmt 3.12.0 with additional patches to support Bash 5.3 is bundled with BashSupport Pro 5.0.
ShellCheck
ShellCheck 0.11.0 is bundled, which supports the new syntax of Bash 5.3.
To suppress warnings, ranges of ShellCheck codes are supported now,
e.g. # shellcheck disable=SC2000-SC3000.
bats-core
bats-core 1.12.0 is bundled with BashSupport Pro.
The new bats::on_failure function is supported now.
setup_suite.bash files are now highlighted as test sources, in the same way as *.bats files.
On Windows, the navigation to tests from the test runner UI is working now again.
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